Today everyone wants to defend Salman Rushdie. It was not always like that

In 1988, when the Fatwa was issued, many who had enjoyed the fruits of free expressionmore than most could not bring themselves to defend it

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For obvious reasons almost every political person believes that in the past his or her faction was correct on the major questions of the day. Obvious because this is at least part of the reason why they subscribe to that political affiliation in the first place – they believe their side will be right again in the future. So for conservatives while empire was unquestionably brutal, historically it was responsible for the establishment of democracy amongst the people it ruled over. On the Left a major source of pride was the struggle against Hitlerian fascism, which, were to you listen to today’s socialists and social democrats, united the Left around a common purpose and against a universal foe.

The problem in looking at history through this lens, however, is
that it often glosses over divisions which plagued each side at the
time. Not all conservatives were supporters of empire for example.
Some opposed it vociferously. Nor in reality was the political Left
united against Fascism. In his expansive essay The Lion and the Unicorn, George Orwell lambasted the
silly-clever arguments trotted out by certain fellow leftists, who
sneered at the prospect of lining up alongside their countrymen
even if it meant losing the war to the Nazis:

“They will proceed to argue that, after all, democracy is ‘just
the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism. There is not much
freedom of speech in England; therefore there is no more than
exists in Germany. To be on the dole is a horrible experience;
therefore it is no worse to be in the torture-chambers of the
Gestapo. In general, two blacks make a white, half a loaf is the
same as no bread.”

Today Salman Rushdie is the cause célèbre. An argument repeated in recent weeks has
been one which talks up the virtue of TheSatanic Verses in comparison to the controversial film Innocence of Muslims. While the film is a “provocation”
that “goes too far”, The Satanic Verses was different. Of course, in aesthetic
terms anything by Salman Rushdie is invariably better than
Innocence of Muslims - a film which, were it not for the
manufactured “outrage” that has brought it so much publicity, would
fail even to make the low grade of a passable YouTube production.
However liberals were not as united in 1989 as many retrospective
accounts make out.

Since the Fatwa, protecting the sensitivities of religious
believers has become more appealing to progressives in
Britain

While many writers (and many Muslims) at the time publically
defended Salman Rushdie’s right to free expression, some in the
West were unwilling to offer Rushdie their solidarity out of a
misguided attempt to “understand” the sorts of people who do not
need to read books to burn them. One of those was feminist author
Germaine Greer, who refused
to sign a petition supporting The Satanic Verses because she said it was “about his
[Rushdie’s] own troubles”. She added that Rushdie was “a
megalomaniac, an Englishman with a dark skin” (no shame in that,
you might think). In a March 1989 Op-Ed for The New York Times
entitled “Rushdie's Book is an Insult,” former US President Jimmy
Carter argued
that, while Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms were “important”, “
we have tended to promote him and his book with little
acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of
Muslims whose sacred beliefs have been violated”. Others such as
Iqbal Sacranie, the future head of the Muslim Council of Britain
who was later knighted by the Blair government for services to
community relations, went further, and said
that death was “perhaps a bit too easy” for Rushdie.

There were countless
other examples too, most not as extreme as Sacranie (although
the Tory historian Hugh Trevor-Roper came close), but all implying
that Rushdie himself was in some way to blame for his
predicament.

Since the Fatwa, protecting the sensitivities of religious
believers has become more appealing to progressives in Britain as
we have become an increasingly multicultural society. And the
sentiment is a laudable one. As the editor of Middle East Quarterly, Daniel Easterman, himself a former
lecturer in Islamic Studies, puts
it: “[A blasphemy law] is superficially attractive, carrying as
it does heavy overtones of liberalisation, a promise of widening
tolerance in a multicultural but divided society.”

Yet all too often those who reject the premise of an open
society get a hearing as soon as they utter the words “I am
offended”. As well as it being reasonable for the West to demand
that its democratic traditions are respected by other nations,
extending tolerance to the point where free expression is corroded
does a disservice to the many immigrants who come here out of
admiration for such ideas. One of the most depressing things about
the struggle between absolutism and democracy, the late Christopher
Hitchens wrote, is that “so many of the best lack all conviction,
hesitating to defend the society that makes their existence
possible, while the worst are full to the brim and boiling over
with murderous exaltation”.

Today everyone wants to flatter Salman Rushdie. It was not
always like that. In 1989 many who had enjoyed the fruits of free
expression more than most could not bring themselves to assuredly
defend it. Oh how much easier it is to be on the correct side of
history when events are in the distant past. Much harder to
recognise that the struggle for free expression is an ongoing one,
and that to stand up for it is to stand firm even when it is
buffoons like Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, rather than literary men
and women, who are testing its limits.